1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording medium, an apparatus for recording a moving image to the recording medium and an apparatus for generating a digest of the moving image in order to quickly and briefly see the contents of the moving image formed by a video camera or the like. Hereinafter, "a moving image" is referred to as a group of a plurality of static images corresponding to successive frames, regardless of an object being moving or not.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, as a method for briefly grasping the contents of moving images recorded by a video camera or the like, there have been proposed a method in which images are displayed by using a rapid traverse operation of a video tape recorder (VTR) so that a prescribed number of frames are deleted at regular intervals, and a method in which images are displayed so that the reproduction speed can be manually controlled by using a variable speed reproduction operation of the VTR. However, according to the former method, the prescribed number of frames are deleted irrespective of the contents of the respective frames, so that there arises a problem in that necessary frames may be omitted and unnecessary frames may be displayed despite the user's intent. On the other hand, according to the later method, even though the images can be displayed according to the user's intent, a manual operation is required to be performed for a long time throughout the playback.
Conventionally, as a method for generating digest images for a TV program, etc., there has been proposed a method in which the user previously sees all the recorded images end assigns a priority to each frame of the recorded images, as is disclosed in the Japanese Laid-Open Publication No. 3-90968. The priority in determined by the user's judgment. According to such a method, a digest of the images is displayed within a prescribed period of time. Herein, the priority means a degree of importance of each of the images based on the user's feelings. For example, the priority relates to the degree in which the user want to display the image as a digest compared with the other images and the degree in which the user want to display the image as a digest for a longer period of time. Even though such a method is useful for explaining the contents of the images to the other people, it is not useful to the user who wants to know what kinds of contents the images have recorded. This is because the user can grasp the contents of the images when the user assigns a priority to each of the images.